Thursday, July 5, 2012

We couldn't do large, open, video game environments before. Now we can. However, this kind of power is limiting in its own way; you just see the same concepts of grand sweeping vistas, over and over. It's very beautiful and expertly crafted, but it also resembles the same stagnation of a mud-brown rusty metal corridor decorated with skulls -- a certain lack of imagination.

Conceptually, this is Thomas Kinkade, repeating, instantiating, stretching endlessly past our view frustums to infinity. It's always the same sunlit painterly natural realism with some normal-mapped ruins in the foreground.

Porn is beautiful and compelling, but the vast majority operates within the same established conventions. You know what's going to happen because it's not supposed to be the bold frontier of film-making. Instead, it's structured precisely to enable complacency and self-satisfaction.

So I stare at it, slack-jawed. Wow I can't believe they can do that, in that engine? UHH. That mountain is so... so big. Did he use World Machine? UHHH... How many draw calls, all with a single 1024x1024 texture? UHHHHHH... UHHHHHHHH!

I blow my load.

In a few minutes, after I've cleaned myself up, I'll have forgotten that these environments ever existed because they don't exist, they're just staged portfolio videos. They're game environments without a game, spaces without memory nor purpose, sex acts without love.

Don't get me wrong: pornography (and pastoral landscape paintings) can certainly be artistic and powerful. I just don't think they should dominate the culture of film and art, yet they currently do in games, among the Skyrims and Assassin's Creeds and FarCries.